“Please do,” the man from Hutton-Byrum-Kobe said.
“Let’s not jump to any conclusions about what is going on here, yet. Let’s sit tight for another few hours. If there’s been no word from the kidnappers by then, a decision on a plan of action will have to be made.”
There were nods all around.
The strategy was comfortingly familiar When in doubt, freeze.
Huth had bought himself a tiny window of time.
ON HIS BACK inside his coffinlike, executive-grade sleep cubicle, the director of the Totality Concept’s most advanced research program sorted his worldly possessions. From the storage bins along the left-hand wall, he took his spare pair of socks, his two alternate pairs of underwear and a pair of plastic jogging boots. All of these he stuffed into a rucksack.
The bitterness that filled him at that moment was most terrible. His had been a distinguished career in science, a lifetime devoted to the pursuit of knowledge, to rationality, to the betterment of his species. At the top of his form, the peak of his game, he had had a success beyond imagining, beyond compare he had discovered the true salvation of humankind, sanctuary for the desperate billions.
And it had all come down to this.
Huth felt as if he were standing alone on an immense sandy beach, under an empty sky, watching the ominous shadow of a tidal wave loom on the horizon.
He had no intention of meekly waiting for the wave to break.
From an overhead compartment he took his only warm coat, a quilted nylon flight jacket, his navy-blue knit cap, and a pair of insulated gloves, and put them into the backpack.
That part of the packing was simple. His collection of worldly goods was pathetic. He counted himself lucky he hadn’t been born a CEO. The choices would have been so much more difficult.
What was infinitely harder under the circumstances was deciding what scientific equipment, if any, to take with him. Therein, perhaps, lay the biggest tragedy of all. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the gear he relied on in his daily work would be worthless on the other side of the rift. It only functioned thanks to a global support network of power sources, of other gear, and an elaborate social and economic system of other scientists, industry and government.
Even if he could power the equipment, without the social and economic system his results would be meaningless. What did the quality of uranium ore in Bolivia matter if there was no way to refine it, if there was no way to use it once it was refined? Under such conditions, applied science would have the same effect as a tree falling in a deserted forest.
Which was the exact opposite of what FIVE had planned.
In the history of humankind on either world, only a handful of times had such technologically advanced and primitive cultures collided. Huth, off the top of his head, could think of only a single example, when twentieth-century explorers made contact with the Stone Age people of New Guinea. Though there weren’t thousands of years of development separating the two parallel Earths, thanks to the juggernaut of scientific progress, there might as well have been. That gap was destined to remain, despite Huth’s genius, insight and monumental effort.
Anticipating the consequences of an unstoppable population explosion, he had shifted the focus of Operation Cerberus, originally devoted to purely military experiments in time travel, to resource acquisition, using the trawl technology to try to exploit the past and the future for needed raw materials. Based on the success of the famous Theophilus Tanner studies, he had reasoned that if it was possible totrawl a live human being from a century back, it might also be possible to trawl the necessities of life.
Unfortunately, this turned out not to be the case. Because of a law of diminishing returns, it was impossible to rob Peter to pay Paul. It took more energy to bring resources across the barrier than could ever be recovered from them.
During one of the experiments, Huth had caused the passageway to materialize by accident. At first he wasn’t sure what he had discovered. Robotic probes sent across the rift and then retrieved showed the atmosphere on the other side was breathable. Rock samples displayed the same characteristics as those found on Earth. DNA tests of the plants and animals the robots brought back proved they had common ancestries with life on Earth. And the mutation rates gave Huth an idea of the relative age of the two planets; it told him that they were in fact the same place, in different universes.